Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 175 - The Spanish American War Part 2: The One With All of the Diseases

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Typhus! Yellow Fever! Malaria! And more! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today.keys podcast i am joe joe and with me is liam i'm sorry i interrupted you that's fine hi joe i'm liam it's gonna start all the way the fuck but no i'm kidding no go do it no do it bitch this is when we can't fucking nice welcome to lions led by donkeys i'm your new host liam anderson we have seized control of the radio stations oh no the coup oh no it's finally happened i've been cooed speaking of coup we have no so this is like i'm always curious and people pick up on these things like when we have small talk to start episodes with because like you normally we even though some people complain about our banter you know if you don't like banter in a podcast

read a fucking book yeah honestly honestly we're it's we're not 99 invisible we get that on uh i guess our sister show uh well there's a problem quite a bit where people are just like you know i we don't need all these jokes and it's like fucking read the wiki then like yeah i mean like honestly some of the things we talk about without the humor and the banter it's just like soul crushing um wow and i'm in grad school this is the only joy i get out of studying history anymore, so leave me alone. I'm also curious if people ever figure

out when we've been recording back-to-back because we have no banter to start an episode with. Today is one of those days. I've been cooing. I'm cooing. I don't know what you're doing, but I am cooing. When we left you last time, the main exploded and the US ands and spain had declared war on one another and the u.s is about to invade the various territories of spain though again we will be

focusing in cuba and if you want to hear about the philippines go listen to that it's a whole other series i cannot stress that enough someone will still be like what about the philippines what about the philippines you didn't mention guam um actually i was it's unfortunate because the guam part is one of my favorite stories this entire war uh the spanish garrison had no idea that they were at war that's a that's that's a gentlemanly so like the u.s navy like floated up shows up and massacres them i know they fired um like um a battery and the spanish like the spanish commander got in a boat paddled out to where the navy was and asked for ammo so they could fire a salute in response because they like they thought they were just like coming by and saying hi

and like actually no we're we're here to take over your island they're like oh i guess we surrender then because they had that they had no ammo. It was something like a single boat hadn't come from Spain in like three years. Alright, well I guess we're Americans. Probably no worse than this. Sorry, Guam. I don't support what we do to Guam. I feel like I need to say that.

Yeah, it's our bad. Not literally Joe and I's bad, but i did it i am i am eternal i am the highlander i only show up to do bad wars um i mean which means i have to go back to sleep for like six months until we do the next one oh venezuela here we come baby why does joe have a duel and go for spanish um now there's just a small problem for the U S it. Like I pointed out in the last episode, it did not have an army made for like empire.

It wasn't a thing yet. Now for people who listen to our Pancho Villa episodes, this will remind you a lot of that. The U S military as a whole was still based on state volunteer units made up of federalized national guard levied by the States and put under federal command if the need arised. The U.S. military wasn't even called that back then. It was just called the regular army and numbered barely over 25,000 at this point. The Navy really never had this problem.

Everybody likes boats. Well, kind of like I pointed out before, the reason why the founding fathers and most of our early governments really hid the idea of a massive standing army it was like that's how you oppress people right so so but they didn't have the same ideas for the navy like the navy is for securing trade um it was gonna say you've always needed to trade overseas and the united states at that at that point, would have had, I guess, early Canada and whatever was happening to Mexico at that point. Like 1776-ish.

Yeah. That makes sense. And we also send trade over to Europe, which is how we end up fighting the Barbary pirates. trade over to Europe, which is how we ended up fighting the Barbary pirates. I mean, sailors getting Shanghai'd into British crews is what led to the War of 1812, kind of.

And their idea was like, well, it's kind of hard to oppress people with the Navy. You can't just pull up a Navy into a house and corner them there. I see you and I have never played Civ together. But because of we've never had the same calls about the navy our navy was pretty strong um it was significantly more powerful than the spanish navy which is funny when you think of like because we're talking about the spanish empire

um the span for instance the united states had seven battleships while the spaniards had one and it was very old. Suck it, nerds. Not to mention, they only had a detachment of that in Cuba. And they also had to deal with another conflict in the Philippines. So everything they have is split. Everything that's in Cuba is probably the worst Spain has to offer. Oh, yes.

The B team. Yes. But currently stationed in Cuba was a Spanish force larger than the entire U.S. military. Oh, shit. Yeah. Though there were no shortage of people willing to sign up for the U.S. military, far greater than the regular army could absorb, which led to the Volunteer army of the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people rushed the recruiter's office

or their local whoever to volunteer their service for war against Spain. Now, most of these recruiter's offices are just like a guy with a role, like you just signed up. officer just like a guy with a role like you just signed up um now these were formed into three volunteer cavalry units three volunteer engineer units 10 volunteer infantry regiments and a volunteer signal corps um which was like kind of still kind of learning how to do things like balloons were involved these like heliographs and stuff um that's the good shit, Joe. The 7th to 10th volunteer infantries were composed of solely African-American soldiers led by white officers. There's also

a volunteer cavalry like the Buffalo soldiers, the Black Cavalry. Though despite all of this, the vast majority of these soldiers would never leave the United States to fight a war they'd volunteered for. Because funny thing, despite the fact Cuba is very, very close to the United States, the U.S. lacked the ability to transport, equip, train, and overall manage

such a large number of people to send across the ocean, even if it is not that long of a distance. That's the thing. The Navy couldn't handle transporting that many people they're like yeah we don't know how to do that we've already do that we just have a couple marines on board yeah i mean that's why like the um it's like 90 miles from key west man you can do that in a fucking day this is why the barbary wars were all fought by marines and like random uh privateers and shit um because like the army like yeah we don't know how to do boats um

now many of these units uh as well as like guard units regular army units were slowly transported down to florida or for most of the volunteer units sent into the southwest because they had to train i know these guys know how to fight uh where they are housed in large army camps now the idea is that these camps would be used to do medical screening because remember they still hadn't done that uh just like we talked about so like oh you're missing a foot all right i gotta send you home great savings baby uh now as well as training because like the volunteers some of them were like civil war veterans and stuff but like none of them none of them were a unit yet put a fight together.

Now, as anybody who's listened to this show for any length of time will know, camping together outside in a large group in the 1800s with no understanding of medical science or hygiene is never a good idea. Congratulations. You have leprosy. Congratulations. You are now a pandemic. Combine this with most medical professionals in uniform being packed into ships and being part of the first wave down to Cuba meant that there was really nobody left to staff these camps. Also, the entire ration system was incredibly fucked.

So before long, you had camps of thousands of soldiers full of typhus, smallpox, malaria, and starvation. Taste the rainbow, baby! While in the American Southwest, they haven't even made it to war. Like, good news. The U.S. is so efficient here in the volunteer corps of the United States. It will kill you before you even get to war. That's called efficiency, boys. Yep, yep.

Synergy. Many of the training camps in the Southwest were obliterated by typhoid fever caused by... Now, for people unaware, this is caused by salmonella. Now, for a short lesson on this wonderful disease, I went to our friends at WebMD, who normally only exist to tell you that you're dying from your cold.

Now, typhoid fever is contracted by eating or drinking the bacteria found in contaminated food and water people with acute illness can contaminate the surrounding water supply through stool poop it's poop in case people don't know that um which contains a high concentration of the bacteria contamination of the water supply can in turn taint the food supply. The bacteria can survive for weeks in water or dried sewage. So, yes, a bunch of idiot soldiers spreading literal shit all over everything and then shitting more shit into

the water supply until everybody got sick and died. Mmm. Oh, that's tasty. That's great. Of the 171,000 personnel in these training camps, you want to guess how many people got sick? 150,000. Give me something real stupid high.

20,700. That's still real bad. And over 1,500 died before the war even started, which I need to point out, those are significantly more casualties than the united states is going to suffer in this war now this of course brings us to the most famous volunteering unit the one that nobody has nobody's heard enough about right the rough riders led by

lieutenant colonel teddy roosevelt uh they're actually the first United States volunteer cavalry, and they were by no means actual rough riders, so that was their intent. Also, Teddy was in command. He was second in command to Leonard Wood, who now is a military base named after him. Also, Leonard Wood on top of being a cavalry colonel

was also a doctor. Well, I mean, I guess that's helpful. He gets shot downrange. Well, I mean, I guess that's helpful. He gets shot downrange. Yeah, I mean, but back then medicine for that was sawing off your own leg or whatever. You gotta get the ghosts out of your blood. I'm trying to be optimistic. Ghosts out of your blood with cocaine.

That's right. I don't understand. I got shot and I'm just chugging ethanol and I'm not being healed. I can see the sounds unlike Roosevelt Wood had a long military career and had actually already been awarded the Medal of Honor years before

Roosevelt wasn't said a career politician who had lobbied for the war while working for the government as the assistant to the Secretary of the Navy right once the war began he resigned his position to go see combat and was given the rank of the navy right once the war began he resigned his position to go see combat and was given the rank of lieutenant colonel uh this is despite the fact his only previous service had been a four-year chunk of peacetime while serving part-time in the new york national guard

where he was never promoted above the rank of second lieutenant oh tough yeah much like his time as a colonel tennant uses connections to get that rank and never attend any kind of military academy. Meritocracy, folks. We have it. Originally, the plan for the rough riders was to recruit frontiersmen or coal miners and other hard folk. Preferably people who could already ride a horse.

The plan was also to recruit mostly from the southwest, thinking that dudes from that climate would fare better in Cubaa and i'm not being the case what yeah you know arizona havana same climate right what you know what sure yeah why not good luck this guy's already dumb as fuck instead like most situations like this his call for increment brought in people who were not necessarily hard, but they were adventure seekers. Uh, people who, you know,

a lot of like war was different back then. It was a lot, it was a lot like people like honestly up until world war one, like unless to go see the world, see adventure, they thought that shooting a guy was the pinnacle of manhood. Like that hadn't been broken yet. And I mean,

I would argue that still hasn't been broken, depending on who you talk to. But you would have just random people like, hell yeah, let's go. Have you ever rode a horse? Nope. Alright. Now, the reason for this, honestly, and the fame behind the Rough Riders, even during the recruitment phase,

was pretty much Teddy himself. People knew the Roosevelt family. Teddy was already kind of a minor celebrity. Obviously, people knew that he was in the government uh and he was a guy who loved to huff his own farts all of this pr around teddy roosevelt is because of teddy roosevelt oh yeah all of that is manufactured uh like his time is like a frontiersman he had like hired guides and shit that made sure he didn't die but they never would nobody ever write about those guys um i mean that's smart as fuck to his credit no i mean it literally made him president like right exactly like this 100 worked in teddy's favor

um now what he did collect was a weird group of ivy league athletes glee club singers a couple texas r, and a few Native Americans, as well as a bunch of old retired soldiers and cops. Alright. Rough Riders. You can watch a buddy comedy about that at least. No, that's 100% like a comedy

that should be made, but instead of just the cop being racist, the Native American constantly. Now, some of the guys were even less than that. just like the cop being racist constantly. Now, some of the guys were even less than that. There was a bar, I believe, in Houston, Texas, maybe it was San Antonio, some city in Texas, that a group

of drunk guys just wandered up and we'd like to enlist. And the guy who handed the rolls was there and was like, yeah, all right. You'll do nicely as a magnet. Yep, that's right. Can you ride a horse? Nope.

Honestly, the horse thing ends up not being that important, but we'll get there. The Rough Riders were to fall in a division commanded by a former Confederate General, Joseph Wheeler, who was himself under the command of former Union General William Rufus Schaefer, which I'm sure was not awkward at all. Right! Like, hey, remember that time we destroyed the entire country? Just like a picture of his dead son. It's like, scoreboard!

Scoreboard! You like that shit? Every time you leave your house, I'm gonna burn it down. Oh, this is my William T. Sherman shrine. Yes, I know. He did a genocide during the Indian Wars. Let me have my jokes.

Yeah, yeah. You know, that's one of the things, like when your job is killing people for a living, sometimes you end up doing some awful things. Weird how that works out. Now, for the Rough Riders, having people like Wood and Teddy in charge was a pretty sweet deal. Wood was well known and Teddy was incredibly powerful and rich. So they are able to use their connections to make sure they're outfitted with the best guns in the country at the time and even had a machine gun, which was rare as fuck for those days.

Now, unfortunately those guns and machine guns both kind of sucked. Um, yeah, the, I was thinking like you'd want to be in a VIP unit, I guess. Yeah. I mean, they, they got preferential treatment through and through um now they were issued with the springfield 8 1892 which is

better known as the crag jorgensen rifle um no one is that yeah most people just know it as a crag or the crag jordan there was even a song about it like in the phil in the philippines theater of the war um uh the saying was civilize him with the crag yeah it's great yep yep i sang the whole song back in the three-part series go listen to it it's terrible um now the crag was real real bad uh the spanish gun with the mauser 1893 was better in every way possible, which is why the Krag has the shortest rifle service life of any American

weapon tied with, I think, the M14. I was going to say the M14. Yeah. Also use it, though, for specialized diaper applications. There's a version of the M14 that's used for squad marksmanship roles and stuff like that.

Yeah. Also, the machine gun that was given out was the Colt 1895, better known as the Potato Digger. We really do not name them like we used to. No. This was a gift. This was not issued by the government. The Potato Digger was never issued by the government. They're the first machine guns, not Gatling gatling guns those are different to be deployed in combat by

the u.s military but they were considered so shitty they were actually never officially adopted by the u.s military instead instead people just bought them and brought them to war well that's bad um yeah it's like there's a quite a few of them like marines had a few of them and it was pretty much like their commander and like the some like boat admiral bought a whole bunch of them um i got you guys a present now

unfortunately this gun is probably best known for being the weapon of choice during the lublo massacre where uh pinkerton's massacred a whole bunch of strikers yeah right because again you could just buy one the rough riders also pick their own uniforms which actually used to be a pretty common practice amongst u.s volunteer units especially during the civil war um have you ever seen some of these weird ass uniforms somewhere like the swabs Yep. It's incredible. They're wearing like Aladdin pants and like Fez is in the combat looking at wearing like bright red and like orange and shit.

They won't see us coming boys. Yeah, it looks like a clown college marching in unison. Now they chose the Rough Riders that is they chose a slouch hat a blue flannel shirt brown trousers leggings and boots with handkerchiefs loosely knotted around their necks meaning that yes they looked like the community theater imagination

of a cowboy and that's exactly what they were going for they wanted to look like cowboys even though like not that many of them were actually cowboys it's great they're all just I don't even know what the word is Of course it was. They wanted to look like cowboys, even though not that many of them were actually cowboys. It was great. They're all just... I don't even know what the word is. They were actually soldiers, but they were cosplaying as cowboys.

It's very weird. Now, after this, they went off to training, which due to various levels of experience, most of it nothing. They went through very basic cavalry training. Unlike most cavalry units in the military they decided to completely skip the saber training like you know swords uh which were very common for cavalry like people cavalry carried sabers into world war one um which is probably a good call because it's almost the 1900s for fuck's sake but also nobody knew how to use one but also

hey man you never know what you're going to need to do one. Look, it's easy to teach someone how to use a rifle. It's kind of hard to teach someone how to sword fight from the ground up. Fair enough. Like a gun is pulling a trigger. A sword is like, all right, step one, you know. But again, they were training in the southwest with everyone else living in that camp life. So typhoid fever and malaria swept through and

decimated their numbers shocked to hear that claiming around one fourth of their unit and my god is not this is not going to be the last time I point out how many people have died from yellow fever and typhoid and shit now the rough riders were eventually loaded up on trains

horses and all and shipped down to Florida and that is where their horses were like a lot of other soldiers at the time riders were eventually loaded up on trains, horses and all, and shipped down to Florida. And that is where their horses were, like a lot of other soldiers at the time, supposed to be getting loaded onto ships for transit to Cuba. But the government had botched the transportation system so

incredibly badly. I'm shocked to hear that they botched it. That there were not enough ships for everybody. So, like, not only not enough ships for their horses, those would all get left behind, but were not enough ships for everybody so like not only not enough ships for their horses those would all get left behind but also not enough for their men though Teddy Roosevelt made sure to pull enough strings to make sure his horse made the

trip of course of course thank you I get paid for this ladies and gentlemen he's the cavalry commander of a unit with one horse. Congratulations, sir. You've done it.

Now, if this sounds bad, and it is, remember that they were a cavalry unit and nobody had trained as infantry, which I can attest is bad. Of only eight of the 12 companies would make the trip and those eight were under strength due to disease so like not that much of the rough riders actually made it into the war so i've already touched a bit on yellow fever for people who don't know it's a disease spread in tropical areas through mosquito bites that causes you know general terribleness jaundice of the skin hence the name your skin turns yellow, as well as, in the worst case scenario, internal bleeding,

which will lead to death. Because since it's the late 1800s, if you have internal bleeding and liver failure, there's no treatment for you. You die. You die real, real bad. Even today, in 2021, there's no cure for this disease other than one bite

mitigation from mosquitoes and you know if if you do catch yellow fever um you have to like one of the main part when most people that get yellow fever vomit and like puke and sweat and shit uh so like you just have to stay hydrated until it passes. So now if you catch yellow fever and you have really bad luck, you just get hooked up to IVs until you get over it. But for 15% of people who do catch it, it turns toxic, turning you yellow and destroying your liver and kidneys and eventually killing you. For people who get to that point, the first point, which is your skin turning yellow. Because you can suffer a little bit of internal damage and still survive. Even back then, though, I'm sure you have some horrible shit going on later

in life because you can't exactly go to the hospital and get treated for that. But for people who have the first turning of the jaundice skin, your fatality rate jumps to 50%. Oh, cool. Now, those are modern numbers. Those are numbers I found today. Fuck. Fuck.

So, like, 1898, those numbers are much higher. You're just going to die. Yeah. Now, it says 15% but this is like with mosquito bite mitigation which I should remind you they don't know mosquitoes cause it yet right

so like you know like we kind of joked about before you just gotta get the ghost out of your blood we don't fucking know um there's no treatment except like throw him off to the side. Maybe he'll come out of it. Maybe he won't drink water, which you'll then just vomit up, right? Good luck to

you. Right now, people of the day were well aware of the dangers of yellow fever. The concept of yellow fever was not new to them, but they hadn't figured out what caused it yet. They just knew that in certain seasons it would pop up real, real bad and those seasons should be avoided. Those seasons

of course happen when mosquitoes reproduce that is why most military leaders and health professionals of the day even then said the US should not invade Cuba during the summer because that's when it rains a whole lot and then

mysteriously everybody gets yellow fever obviously anybody who's grown up in a place a lot of mosquitoes knows that's when fucking mosquitoes breed and they are everywhere after that. And that is like if we invaded during the summer during the summer rainy season, that is when yellow fever and

malaria would be at its worst. So we should absolutely not do that. So of course that's just a US ditch. Starting the war off with a ground invasion in the beginning of june not to mention like yellow fever malaria and bugs the size of helicopters aside like all these lily ass white dudes from the u.s cannot deal with this heat and humidity i'm going to say probably 50 fucking times and then people died of heat stroke but like

it was literally happening from the time people stepped foot on the island until they left like in the middle of battle people were like reloading their guns and then just keel over it was incredible like you just don't see shit like that um so a few days before the start of the ground invasion the u.s and spanish navies had been dueling it out around guantanamo bay which had not turned evil yet this is the guantanamo bay origin story unfortunately yep i do explain that we still send the checks yes yeah they just sit in a desk somewhere uncashed. Now, the U.S. planned to land near a place called Fisherman's Village, a very creatively named place. As the U.S. blockade had been pretty successful at this point in bottling up the Spanish fleet about 40 miles away in Santiago Harbor, the Spanish defending the bay could really only rely on two gunboats, the Alvarado and the Sandoval, to support their 5,000 soldiers they had defending the landing.

The Spanish also had a blockhouse, which is a hard fortification. Not exactly poured concrete or anything, but it'll stop small arms fire that had gun ports. For now. This is very much one of those wars that when you look at

technologies rapidly outpacing tactics and fortification building. This happened during the Russo-Japanese war when the Russians were like, Haha, we are safe within these wooden bunkers. Japanese just dropped 200 millimeter mortars on them or whatever. So this black house has had the center of their defense over the fisherman village and it overlooked the entire thing. So like if you're invading the village, you're going to get fucked up by the black house. And there's other chains of black houses defending the railroad, which went all the way to Guantanamo City, which is about 15 miles away. But this control

was not uncontested remember there's a civil war going on there's been an insurgency going on for years and cuban rebels are all over the place they pretty much control everywhere that spanish aren't to include roads so this the spaniards really like there's no safe retreating route at any point uh the spanish know if they leave any of their fortifications, they'll get fucked up by rebels. Sure. So on June 6th, the Spanish learned the defensive system was maybe

not cut out for fighting an enemy that was not relegated to small arms like the Cubans had been. Because their blockhouse overlooking the village was reduced to a pile of shit by a single shell from the guns of the USS Marblehead. Also, we used to be better at naming ships, too. Marblehead is a gross place to go.

Don't go there. Is that name it for a place? Yeah, Marblehead, Massachusetts, I assume. I mean, that would make sense. Where else would they have gotten that fucking name? Right. Now, as soon as the Spanish gunboat the u.s had deployed three ships with six pounder cannons at them they decided it's a good time to haul ass leaving the bay

pretty much uncontested uh escaping down a nearby channel while this is going on rebel action naval gunfire several severed telegraph lines and plunge guantanamo bay into darkness with no communications to the outside world oh boy this is pretty much something like the rebels were really fucking good at um because like you know telegraphs and heliographs are a thing now so the the rebels like we should just shoot those uh then the spanish can't talk to one another right but like at no point did the spanish ever try to figure out like we should try to repair them it was like ohgraphs down. I guess we have to sit here and die now. Do you guys like semaphore?

It was then a few days later on June 10th that the ground forces made up of the first battalion of the U.S. Marines were sent ashore, crammed into a converted transport ship, the USS Panther, where they landed unopposed. Which is a real fuck up on the part of the Spanishanish here because this wasn't like a higgins boat from world war ii this was not a purpose-built landing craft this is just a boat i assume a canoe with a 50 cal strap to it no this is just a transport ship oh wow okay they're like the the the marines had to get off the ship by land by standing in straight lines and waiting for their turn to get off on the gangways that led down to the beach. That's embarrassing. So like the Spanish like, oh, look, there's some Marines. All right, they're getting off now. Hey, guys.

This was made worse by the fact that the captain of the Panther refused to allow their ship's crew to help unload the thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo that are on board, leaving it to a single artillery company to do it all themselves. For people themselves. Wow. I would not be happy.

A company's about 130 dudes. It's not that many people. Thousands of rounds. Not to mention, get the fucking boat off the beach. At any point the Spaniards remember that they're fighting a war, you're fucked. You're riding on a bomb.

After begging and pleading to make sure the landings go quicker, the Marine commander, a guy named Colonel Huntington, had to send a message to the overall commander of the landing, Commander Bowman McCalla, again, great name, to tell the captain to help,

which he finally did after hours of bitching and moaning. Finally, on the beach the marines dug in sitting outposts and expecting an attack that just didn't come uh like they assumed that they hit the beach in the spanish and immediately start shooting at them but they didn't but they could hear spanish and there was um some loyalist cubans as well that were on the spanish side they could they could hear them talking and moving back and forth in the bushes. Here's one of the funnier parts that just shows how desperate the Spanish

troops were in Cuba. It turns out the Spanish were planning on attacking, but were waiting for the Marines to unload their food. So they could get the food? So they could steal it. You dicks! The Spanish military in Cuba was so horribly unsupplied that they were like,

okay, we understand these guys are invading, but if we let them invade all the way, we could steal their hard tech. God, that's so fucking depressing. Right. And these aren't local levies. These are Spanish conscripts from Spain that had been sent there. Like you would expect the Spaniards to train Cubans that badly or treat Cubans that badly. Cause like,

of course they were there. Right. Yeah. These are actual Spaniards. Like now fuck them too. We don't need to feed them. And almost all of them are riddled with disease. Um,

a theme. Yeah. Everyone. So everyone at this point is riddled with horrible disease uh now the marines learned that the loyalist fighters that being cubans loyal to spain were hiding out in the jungle and using the coup of the morning dove as a signal to one another which is inventive but all that did is teach the marines they need to shoot every fucking bird they saw like they they didn't really

know the difference between the birds, because they've never been to Cuba before. The birds are different. So they're just like, look, a bird! And everybody just opened fire on it. Which is honestly the most marine thing that they would fucking do. Marine counterintelligence. Shoot every bird.

By the 11th, the Marines were mostly unloaded in what had been named Camp McCalla, though they had left their artillery on the transport ship for some reason. And by this point, there hadn't been any Spanish attempt to kick them off the beach. So they assumed the threat was low.

Not even digging any trenches or fortifications or even bothering to shore up any camp defenses. It was just like people sitting on the beach, just in open sands. Just enjoying VKU, man. We gotta go on vacation, Joe. Doing an armed vacay. They made

an obvious target for snipers hiding up in the hills, however, who began shooting at them. So now, under sniper fire, the Marines began trying to dig in as Spanish soldiers advanced at them from the bushes. There you go, morons. Snipers firing rifles rifles with smokeless powder which was a kind of a new invention not that new um but like it was still like tactics were adopted like trying to adapt to account for it uh but they were also concealed using leaves and old-timey fashion of a ghillie suit were

pretty much impossible to find and the guys on the beach were trying to shoot back, were just missing horribly. Sure. So instead, the jungle was completely obliterated with naval gunfire, which is one way to take care of a sniper. While the Spanish attacked the camp,

they quickly learned that a frontal assault against a machine gun is a very bad idea as the marines opened fire with two potato digger machine guns the marines had brought with them um which the spanish had no idea about like they'd never seen this shit before right by the next day with fighting still raging the marines were reinforced by a small group of cuban rebels led by a guy named colonel enrique thomas which i have to admit that last name threw me for a loop uh that had to be that had been under uh under uh the bowman

macalla's command like on his ship like they had been brought with them from the mainland uh they were on board the marvel head and for some reason that i've never been able to get a full understanding of their uniforms had been switched out mostly cubans wore street clothes like when they fought or captured spanish uniforms they had been traded out for those terrible white navy uniforms like the bright white navy they'll look like the crackacker Jack man. Yeah, they wore those into battle on the beach. I assume they're wearing sun blindness.

Yeah, like fucking incredible, but the Cubans who had been using guerrilla tactics for years now knew exactly how to handle the guys hiding out in the jungle who had not been obliterated by the Navy. They simply set it on fire. Okay. Can't find the Navy. They simply set it on fire. Okay. Can't hide in the jungle

if I set it all on fire. Fair enough. Even through all of this, the Spanish never stopped attacking, pressing the Marines for three days of non-stop fighting. This was all made worse by the Marines, who, I'm going to hate myself for saying this, were the actual tip

of the spear. Oh, Joe. I'm sorry. Every Marine listening is frantically masturbating that I said the words. The U.S. Army and its various volunteer units had yet to leave Florida, meaning the 1st Battalion of the Marines were fucked, unable to be relieved

or reinforced, and had nothing coming to help them. That is when Colonel Thomas pulled the Marines' ass out of the fire all while dressed like a complete and total dumbass. He came up with the idea to attack the nearby Cusco well, held

by four Spanish companies and some loyalists, pointing out that if they took the only fresh water source in the area, spanish would be forced to retreat and give up their attack on the beach not to mention the marines like we could also use some water we're fucking dying here thomas was joined by captain george elliott who led two badly understrength companies to attack the well which would require them to first march at a very fast pace through nearby jungle, which, of course, dropped several men immediately through heat exhaustion,

including both company commanders. As the joint Cuban Marine force approached a hill, they noticed the Spanish were marching towards the same exact hill, and both sides broke into a run, trying to be the first ones to take the high ground. It's fine. It's fine. I saw it first. It's fine. This is when a couple Marines from C Company

got a really good idea. They had brought the machine guns with them. Why don't we use the machine guns as we're running up the hill? Because remember, these machine guns are supposed to be mounted to it. The potato diggers are pretty small. They're like 30-ish pounds, which aren't super heavy when you compare them to

modern light machine guns. But there is no... Yeah, there's 50 60 or not uh like i think a 240 bravo is 30 ish pounds i might be off um no like you can you're not supposed to use that standing up either you can i mean depending on your body size i can fire a 240 bravo standing up because i'm pretty big. I'm not going to hit anything with it, though. But not to mention, there is a pistol grip on that. There's a buttstock.

Right. They have none of this, right? No, absolutely not. It's a square fucking box with a belt attached to it with ammo coming off it. So there's no idea here that this is going to work. Not to mention, it's cumbersome. The barrel's fucking stupid. It's not meant to be fired from anything other than a tripod.

So looking at that, the Marines simply picked them up and ran off firing them with everyone else. Now, the fire rate itself was catastrophic. This ended up tipping the tide of the battle as a spanish just couldn't match sprinting up a machine sprinting up a hill while being chased by a machine gun wielding psycho marine who accidentally and this is true invented the first offensive use of a machine gun for mobile fire support completely on the fly so like this man like yo fuck this let's get the fuck out of here and that's that's one thing i do have to give credits from credit for marines for i don't think a soldier would have thought of

this this is something marines would have thought of like so credit where credit's due i suppose now after getting hit by a storm of random gunfire the spanish pulled back to a better position in a blockhouse and captain elliot using a flag system require requested a nearby gunboat the uss dolphin to start raining shells down on them which of course began falling directly on top of the marines um because of course it did right yep yep this is something incredible to me um like there's no radios. Those aren't a thing yet. There's no way to tell the boat, yo, you're killing us.

Please fucking stop. Other than flags. Other flags for please stop shooting me? It's like Morse code, but with flags, I guess. Right. Yeah. Now, with no good way to tell them to to stop the visual line being cut by the bombardment smoke and dust marines were fucked until a guy named sergeant john quick decided he would have

just had to figure this out himself while on the line getting shot at by the spanish he tied a bandana to the end of his rifle and began with to send what's known as a wigwag which is an old timey name for the signal flag system and he had to run to the high ground while exposing himself to fire from the Spanish and not to mention like remember the boat is also blowing them up and quickly signaled the ship to

adjust their fire where he did and it worked he didn't get shot ship changed their fire and took out the blockhouse and he was fine. Just fuck. Jesus.

Now, after this, the blockhouse is blown to hell. The Spanish began to retreat from the hill and the most serious casualties suffered by the Marines are from heat exhaustion, which disabled one officer

and 22 men. Oh, Lord. Well, meanwhile, the Spanish had 60 killed and 22 men. Oh, Lord. Meanwhile, the Spanish had 60 killed and 150 wounded. I would like to believe that it was by the couple Marines going fucking ham on machine

guns, but they probably didn't hit anything. Still, though. Yeah. You would watch this buddy cop movie. Two machine guns, two Marines. Well, I'm pointy. That potato digger was two days away from retirement.

Talk about tip of the spear, Joe. I'll never say it again, I promise. I promise. And while the mission was a success and the well was taken, it had been destroyed in the fighting. Meaning that the Marines could... Three-car number one, baby. Hey, if we destroy the well well they can't use it either which i mean is one way to do like if they were to be pushed back from the hill the

spanish would have lost the well uh though i'm willing to bet that was an accident after like it got hit with a fucking dolphin shell or whatever happened yeah yeah uh now at this point the marines were pretty much near heat stroke and they pretty and they just collapsed around the wreckage and they waited for two hours until water could be hand carried up from the uss dolphin so they didn't die so this finally broke the attack on camp mccalla and it became known as the hundred hours of fighting because naming battles back then apparently still sucked. It's a hill and it's this many meters tall. Yeah.

The Spanish confused by the amount of firepower that had been brought against them on the hill in the fight over the well, told the garrison commander of Guantanamo City that the invasion force is much larger than they had originally thought because they had been attacked by at least 10,000 soldiers.

Instead, it was just like two very understrength companies of Marines, everybody dying of heat stroke and two psychos who figured out they could just video game a machine gun. Now at this point, I figured this out in the arcades Now, at this point... You guys ever play Doom?

I figured this out in the arcades. Now, at this point, most of the Spanish defense of the bay was centered around Fort Toro, where they had begun to dig in and shore up their defenses, realizing that, oh, shit, the Americans actually mean it. They also had several large cannons,

including a breech-loading rapid-firing Krupp gun and a Maxim machine gun. Now, the Spanish were assuming that the Americans were going to pull up, dislodge a transport ship, spit out Marines into the beach, just like they had done before. And they were waiting for them. They assumed that, just like they had done at the bay, they were going to show up and this time they'd be ready for them. Yeah, but this is America and we can't follow we can't even follow our own tactics.

That's right. And it's probably the most Indiana Jones ass possible battle. The US simply rolled into the area with their Navy, bombarded the fort for 15 minutes and destroyed everything. It was a priority, baby. Yeah, like if you have fire support, why the fuck am I going to...

Even commanders back then who cared even less about the lives of their soldiers and Marines than they do now are just like, no, I'll just blow it up. Why would I go all the way over here when I have guns on this boat? Yeah. The Spanish weren't able to land a single shot on the ships. To make it even funnier, the Marblehead, the USS Texas, the USS Yankee, all the ships taking part in the broadside, had floated directly into a minefield with dozens of sea mines all around them.

The USS Texas even though they were bumping into quite a few of them, and not a single one exploded because their various mechanical faults from like electrical feeds and whatever. But also because the Spanish had just chucked them out there and forgot about them. And then barricades had grown over the detonators, making them just like floating death traps that would blow up whenever they wanted it. But not when you wanted them to. up whenever they wanted it but not when you wanted them to now at this point finally at the end of june the u.s army showed up to help the marines as you missed the show guys um what what fucking um it's a movie or a tv show like did i miss the battle like you missed the whole war uh w's national guard deployment

now uh the marine or the army showed up to help under the command of general uh schaefer and landed at the towns of daiquiri and saboni uh and that's when teddy and his gang of malaria typhus and yellow fever infected rough riders finally hit the beach uh there's oh yeah man there's also like attempts by the military at this point to control the infections because like they realize they're getting like melted by disease right this ends with them like burning down villages like i'm pretty sure they burned that they burned down daiquiri which is fucked up that's not how you control disease spread yeah every every vacationing white guy is so mad at you for ruining daiquiri.

There's also like they burnt some fields, which honestly is a way to get rid of mosquitoes. Right. If they knew it was mosquitoes. Because of the pool of water, right? Yeah, yeah. With these forces, the US could finally pressure Santiago itself, where they came across a rearguard action by a Spanish army led by General Ontario Ruben. Now Cuban scouts that being Cuban rebels had gone ahead of the Americans as per usual into the jungles outside of Santiago.

And they saw the Spanish forces were packing up to leave withdrawing back towards their main base in the city of Santiago itself. Right now, this is obviously the rebels like, Oh cool. They're, they're leaving. We don't got to fight them.

Enter general Wheeler. Now, this is obviously the rebels like, oh, cool. They're leaving. We don't got to fight them. Enter General Wheeler. Now, Joseph Wheeler assumed the Cubans were wrong because, of course, he did. This guy's a confederate. He's not going to listen to anything the Cubans said. He doesn't even think they're people. He thought it made much more sense if he was the Spanish. He would simply dig in with their field guns because that's what any normal functioning military does, resist their attack. But the Spanish

were having a harder time mustering any kind of fighting spirit around their men stuck in the jungle, getting raided by Cuban insurgents, blown up by American ships and dying from disease. Yeah, for every one, I'm going to do some inexact math here, but I think from

every one person lost in combat for the spanish side they lost like 50 from disease it might even be more than that um that's crazy so like it's really hard to like you know rally some spree decor you know like my man my pants are caked and shit i my skin is as low as the sun yeah like my mouth tastes like blood i just want to lay down and die i don't give a fuck about the americans not to mention like there's there's war all over the island not just the american front there's nowhere safe for the spaniards to go the insurgents are hitting them everywhere so it's not like oh if we get away from the front lines we'll be safe like no as i'm leaving front lines, some guy that I don't see from the jungle is going to shoot my fucking kneecaps out.

Like, they don't. It's just not good. So when Wheeler turned to the Cuban commander, Colonel Gonzalez Clavel, and said they should attack immediately, Clavel pointed out that it made much more sense to simply let the Spanish withdraw, then fight a pointless battle over nothing. And the colonel refused. So Wheeler just ordered the attack without him. And the Cubans, to their credit, stayed the fuck out of it. Like,

nah, this one's out of you, buddy. Good luck! We'll be back here cheering. As the Rough Riders and the 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, also without horses, went into battle, they noticed something they didn't think of previously. Oh boy is thick and you can't see a fucking thing that's funny how that works not only could they not see where the enemy was remember all command and control at

this point of warfare is visually based right once people start shooting you can't hear much you can hear a little but like yelling orders doesn't really work. A lot of it's hand and arm signals. At this point of war, it's mostly just like, stay with everyone else who looks like you. If we all stay as a blob, we'll probably be okay. If all of us are invisible, then none of us are visible, then all of us are invisible.

So the commanders lost the ability to pass orders, and then soldiers started getting like lost, um, make things even more confusing. A few civilians with them, including journalists. Oh,

like one named Edward Marshall decided he would just pick up a gun and join the war. Um, so like there's people in uniform. I appreciate the enthusiasm. Right. I guess there's like three different uniforms. The Marines are floating around. Some civilians with guns.

Not to mention... Some dudes. Just guys being dudes, Jeff. Just dudes all vibing in the jungle. Not a cell phone in sight. Just enjoying the moment. Dying of typhus. To make matters even worse,

remember, they have to march there. They have to march through the jungle. And that march was much harder than anything the cavalry guys were prepared for. Because remember, they were riding horses for training. They were not prepared for this foot march through the jungle shit. Teddy said, quote, many of the men

foot sore and weary from the march of the preceding day found the pace up this hill too hard and either dropped their bundles or fell out of line, with the result that we went into action with less than 500 men. Oh, boy. And personally, I just love how the army worked back then. That if a guy decided he just wanted to quit marching, they were like, fine, fuck it. I don't care. Quit that.

Stay over there. Then when the Americans attempted to deploy their fancy potato diggers, they couldn't. You see, the guys, these were normally disassembled and packed on a mule for easy transport because nobody wants to hump 40-odd pounds of gear

through the jungle, right? Yeah, sure. Well, then when the Spanish started shooting at the advancing Americans, the mules ran the fuck away, which dumped their packs into the mud and made the guns useless. And also like when the other pack animals had all the ammo on it and that didn't fall off. Uh, so like, Oh, guess we don't have those. And because visual, like visual, uh, limitations were so bad. Fighting was very close quarters with Americans running into Spanish soldiers.

Only a few feet away. They went into confusing firefights that nobody could tell what the fuck was going on. Fucking terrifying. Like seeing a Spanish head pop out of the bush right next to you like Jurassic Park. Like, clever girl. No thanks.

This is the reason why when someone saw Captain Alan Capron, sorry, sorry guy guy get shot and die so i guess i'm not that sorry you can't be offended you're dead um jesus joe someone actually thought that it was colonel leonard wood like oh shit the colonel's dead so they ran back and told teddy that the colonel was dead and he was in charge which he the size of texas yeah of course he was like fuck yeah now my time's a shine but like he did his job and immediately took command that's what you're

supposed to do right but he colonel wood was still alive so you have like colonel and anti-colonel passing fucking yeah yeah exactly uh passing orders uh and some soldiers being told that colonel wood is dead but like but that's not true i just saw him like no no colonel uh roosevelt said he's dead so you have to listen to him now so everything is just confused uh and then during one advance joseph wheeler uh the general who remember former confederate apparently high on combat and not entirely sure where he was anymore oh boy screamed out let's go boys we got those damn yankees on the run again to the i'm sure the very confused glances of the black soldiers nearby uh no dude where do you think you are bud like two Two buffalo soldiers like, shoot the white guy.

I always do it. I couldn't trust him. However, they actually didn't. Kill Whitey. I know you're going to edit that out, but kill Whitey. However, they didn't really have them on the run. Despite their confused attempts, what the US was doing was actually a glorified frontal assault against a fortified position. That's a good tactic right there.

This is what's known in the business as a bad idea. Because while the Spanish were pulling back, they were attacked before they could fully retreat. So they're like, oh, we just have to get back in our positions now. So they just sat back in their dugouts and just started fucking them up and the thing is is like they still withdrew that was their whole plan it was a fighting withdrawal so they held their positions fucking up the americans uh until the american advance was kind of stunted a bit and then they pulled back santiago in good order like they originally planned Now, this was in military terms, at least a victory for the Spanish. Though, if you read it

anywhere in the American side of history, like, no, they took the field. Okay, Napoleon. Sure. I'll indulge you. I mean, more than that, they got away from US's naval fire.

They couldn't get shelled from the various battleships anymore, which had been just wrecking their shit for a while. So the US claimed victory saying they chased the Spanish from the field. Remember, they were already leaving. This is the you can't fire me. I quit of battles. Most later historians pointed out that the Spanish had changed their mind and decided to sit in their positions and not withdraw. It would have been a fucking disaster for the US. And because of the overgrowth, most people think that the Spanish didn't actually realize how bad they had the Americans.

At this point, the Spanish, what they're going to call a naval gunfight, they're going to do something. We're still going to withdraw. But the Americans are just human waving at them if they just sat and fought like this i mean the u.s almost certainly still won the war but like you maybe you at least shoot teddy roosevelt or something down a little bit yeah um now an officer with the rough riders actually agreed as much saying quote it's a good thing we're not at war with England, Germany, or France. We would not last a week. Which is an own on yourself, but also a grievous

own on the Spanish. Murder-suicide own, yeah. Yeah. Now, June ended with a few minor Spanish victories, like stopping the Americans from landing supplies. This is something that the US is trying to do throughout the war was where the insurgency was going on and the american war effort was not they would like circle ships

around to drop off ammo guns occasionally a couple advisors and stuff to to better their push wherever they were fighting one of those is the battle of tayakoba um where like a couple american gunboats were fought off. But none of this really mattered. They weren't actually battling. All they were doing was stopping the insurgents from getting supplies. Though the insurgents were also just milking supplies from the Spanish constantly. Because every Spanish soldier they kill, there's a rifle, there's some ammo, there's whatever.

Is that a crime yet? I mean, technically, looting in war isn't a crime now if you loot from civilians it's a crime um but if you like if you happen to be fighting war uh against someone using the same kind of ammunition from you as you taking their ammo that's not legal that's just good taste uh good enough efficiency uh like i think um that happened uh during the falklands war because both the british and the argentinians were using the same rifle but the argentinians were using one that had an automatic setting and the british didn't so it was really common for uh british soldiers to like throw off their british rifles and pick up the argentinian ones because they had automatic,

which is a very soldier thing to do. Also, as someone who's a soldier in the modern day, I'm like, how the fuck do you get away with that? Okay, well, why doesn't the serial number on your rifle not match? Don't worry about that. Yeah, I threw it away and picked up an enemy one, which is

very much a modern soldier problem. It was back then then nobody gave a fuck apparently but July would bring the bloodiest battles of the war in Cuba from which Spain would never be able to recover and the ones that almost

everyone has heard about in regards to this war that's right the battle of San Juan Hill and that is where we will pick up next week all right so liam how you feeling so far about about about this conflict i thought we were recording a duology and now i feel like a real asshole joe uh i i just love the idea of like all right we'll just go home like this being a theme like just dudes being like,

nah, man, like that ain't me. Like I'm going home. I'm honestly like kind of shocked. Like I knew there was like a part of like this, this just absolute rot from the Spanish empire, which is what led to,

you know, this looking like low-hanging fruit for the united states um but like it is very much two incredibly incompetent military just smashing into one another and seeing which one blinks first um because it is nuts to watch like how decrepit the spanish empire was like how long these empires lasted sort of on their last gasps yeah thank god that's not applicable no not not at all that couldn't possibly happen anymore um it's it's two incredibly incompetent militaries but that's like where you see like the weird independent spirit i hate to

use that term of like military of american military ventures because it's really not until world war ii where we really figure out the war thing and even then it's mostly manufacturing right that we're really good at but it's like the independent spirit of like dumb american adventurism is what always kind of like pulls us through all these old-timey wars it's not like having brilliant generals. We do eventually make a couple of those like okay ones, but it's almost always just like soldiers having way too much fun at war. And like, no, fuck it.

We'll just free wheel some machine guns and run through the jungle. Who gives a shit? Um, it's very, very weird. It's almost like, um, like if you look back at,

um, especially this early part of american imperial american empire building is a lot like reading about the the british adventure soldiers from like the 18 uh 1800s early 1900s uh there's a lot of parallels though for all of the weird ways that they win battles but also all the grotesque shit that comes with it because i'm not like forgiving any of that obviously right uh anyway that is part two uh liam this is the plug zone plug your plug plug zone yeah listen to my other podcast uh well there's a problem it's a leftist engineering disasters podcast with slides and jokes uh jokes are mandatory pick up your joke at the joke distribution point uh communism aren't funny

unless everybody gets one um all right in my books by his books uh i have to eat because i'm already cheating god i really love that we're trying to record while you're fasting it's going to make some incredibly angry outbursts you have no idea man anyway until next time um we already said don't invade cuba uh until next time dual wield machine guns yeah like do you guys have seen the bfg yeah exactly do that later bye